May 22

Events

1453: A lunar eclipse occurs while Constantinople is under siege by the Ottoman Turks. The Byzantines take it as a bad omen since an old legend stated that Constantinople would never fall while the Moon was waxing.
1825: Laskarina Bouboulina, heroine of the Greek War of Independence, is shot dead after a family dispute with in-laws.
1922: Petros Protopapadakis forms a government.
1925: Constantine VI resigns as Patriarch of Constantinople.
1947: The Truman Doctrine was enacted as US Congress appropriated military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey.
1963: MP Grigoris Lambrakis is run down by a delivery truck driven by two right-wing extremists (Emmanouil Emmanouilidis and Spyros Gotzamanis) after delivering the keynote speech at a pacifist meeting in Thessaloniki. He will die five days later.
2006: The 19th century painting The Naughty Grandchild by Nikiforos Lytras became the most expensively sold piece of artwork by a Greek painter, going for 1.08 million euros at an auction at Sotheby's in London.

1960: Kostas Sfikas breaks the Greek record in the triple jump with 15.45m.
1994: Niki Xanthou breaks the Greek women's record in the long jump with a jump of 6.67m. The old record - 6.64m by Charoula Lambrou - had stood for 15 years.